Finding the right words for a literary tradition and
translationEnglish
Professor John Felstiner translates Paul Celan, co-edits anthology
of American Jewish literature

BY
JOHN SANFORD

In
his introduction to the recently published Selected Poems and
Prose of Paul Celan, Stanford English Professor John Felstiner
poses a question that is exquisite and wrenching:

"Would we, if somehow this
were possible, trade Anne Frank's diary for her life, give up those
salvaged pages to let her survive unscathed, in her seventies now?
And would we forego Charlotte Salomon's Life or Theater?,
her 1941 autobiography in 760 watercolors, if in exchange she were
not to perish at Auschwitz? Would we, in effect, do without such
indispensable human documents, relinquish them so as to secure the
undeflected lives their creators might have lived?"

The
passage compels us to reflect on what it would mean to never read
Frank's words, with the richness they afford our understanding of
history, suffering and tenderness, even as we continue toward
Felstiner's inevitable response:

"Why
yes! it goes without saying."

The
questions in the passage also point to the Jewish identity of the
diarist and artist, whose works went on to animate the blood and
flesh of their ideas long after their lives were
extinguished.

In
addition to translating Celan's poems and prose, Felstiner recently
has helped to complete a project that turns centrally on the notion
of Jewish identity in writing and art: He is among four editors who
have compiled, annotated and written essays for Jewish American
Literature: A Norton Anthology (2000).

An
event celebrating the new anthology is set for 7:30 p.m. Wednesday,
Feb. 28, in the first floor auditorium (Room 113) of Building 260.
The program, which is free and open to the public, will feature
students singing Broadway show tunes; a scene from Clifford Odets'
Awake and Sing!; and readings by some authors whose work is
included in the volume, such as Carl Rakosi, who is one of the
oldest living poets in the world.

Felstiner, 64, had never
before worked on an anthology when, in 1996, one of his former
graduate students, Kathryn Hellerstein (now a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania), recruited him to help edit the
proposed volume.

"It
was an immense job," Felstiner said. "And it was a labor of
love."

One
of the most gratifying aspects of the project, he said, was the
"very steep and exciting learning curve." While he has taught a
course on literature of the Holocaust since 1977, his area of
expertise is literary translation and modern American and European
poetry and literature. He said he knew relatively little about
Jewish American literature when he joined the project.

The
present anthology, which forms the basis of his freshman seminar
this quarter, is split into five main chronological sections --
covering 1654 to the present -- and three special sections, dealing
with Jewish humor, Broadway songs and "Jews Translating Jews."
Felstiner was responsible for the section titled "Achievement and
Ambivalence, 1945-1973," as well as for "Jews Translating
Jews."

In
teaching his freshman seminar this quarter, he decided to try a
different tack. "Usually, when you order a Norton anthology, you
just take it for granted," he said. "It's there like an
encyclopedia. Nobody questions its existence or even its content.
But I thought I would do the opposite here. Since it was such a new
book -- and the problematic nature of it was still so present for
me -- I would make the seminar into a critique of the
book."

The
"problematic nature" of the volume is apparent even in its title,
which Felstiner contested. He pressed for the phrase "American
Jewish" instead of "Jewish American," but he was outvoted by the
other editors.

"Jewish American suggests
that the 'Jewish' part, being an adjective, is subordinate to the
'American' part -- and for a lot of us that's true," he said.
"Whereas if you say 'American Jew,' that says that the American
part is, as it were, contingent, and the Jewish part essential. At
least, that's they way I look at the grammar of it."

In
any case, Felstiner and the other editors agreed to lay out
arguments around both formulations in the introduction, which
begins, appropriately: "At the outset, the editors wrestled with
the question of what to call this anthology."

During an interview,
Felstiner said he was excited by the notion that Jewishness "binds
[Jews from various cultural and national backgrounds] together
around the world and through time."

In
the Norton introduction, co-written by the editors, this idea is
couched in a series of interrogatives:

"The
other formulation -- 'American Jewish literature' -- might also
sound primarily American and secondarily Jewish. Or does that term
point up a distinctively Jewish writing in its American
incarnation? Can we discern an 'American Jew' at the root of the
phrase, someone as deeply akin to Russian or Argentine or Israeli
Jews as to other Americans? Yes and no, depending on the
circumstances. . . . So both terms seem richly
problematic."

The
editors' preoccupation with the title leads, naturally, to a larger
question, which arises a little later: "Do these Jews writing in
America make up a literary tradition, even without being
particularly aware of their forebears? And, if so, what defines
that tradition? As ever, it depends on who's doing the
defining."

Felstiner points out that
defining, say, Renaissance poetry is pretty simple: For the most
part, where and when the poets lived dictate whether they fit into
that category.

"Whereas with Jewish
American literature -- well, what is it? Is it Norman Mailer? Is it
J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye? Is it West Side
Story by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein?" Felstiner
said. (He noted that, as originally conceived, this musical
adaptation of Romeo and Juliet would have told the story of
a Jewish boy's infatuation with an Italian Catholic
girl.)

Felstiner said he has
settled on the following definition: "The piece of literature has
to help us think through the American Jewish experience in some
way."

Works of art also can
reveal a Jewish identity without being pointedly Jewish in content,
Felstiner said. For example, he said there is nothing blatantly
Jewish about Arthur Miller's play Death of a
Salesman.

"But
the character Willy Loman -- kind of marginal, a bit defeated but
always hopeful -- reflects something characteristically Jewish that
I'm sure Miller meant. But he was not concerned to write a
particularly Jewish play," Felstiner said.

When
American Jewish songwriters Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein
II wrote Oklahoma!, they were, Felstiner argues, doing what
all children of immigrant parents do: desiring to possess the new
land.

"And
how do you do that? Not by assimilating, necessarily, but by
acculturating," he said. "Assimilating means you really lose your
Jewishness; acculturating means you keep it but get to live vitally
within the culture and land."

In
the same vein, George Gershwin wrote Porgy and Bess, Irving
Berlin wrote "God Bless America" and Aaron Copland wrote
"Appalachian Spring."

Uninitiated readers of
Jewish American literature -- those whose grasp of the tradition
may be limited to Woody Allen and Allen Ginsberg (both authors'
work is represented in the volume) -- probably will be surprised by
the "variety" and "buoyancy" of the writing in the anthology,
Felstiner said.

Felstiner said that
throughout much of his early life he was aware of his Jewish
identity but "paid very little attention to it" -- that is, until
he took a hiatus from Stanford in 1974 to teach American literature
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

"That just turned my life
around," he said. "And when I got back to Stanford in 1975, I said,
'I need to do something with this.'" He began teaching a course on
literature of the Holocaust and working toward what is now the
Jewish Studies Program.

Then, in 1976, he came
across some of Paul Celan's poetry.

"I
was so struck by Celan's poetry and breathtaken by it that I said
to myself, 'I can't get around this.' I knew I had to go through
rather than around it," Felstiner said, noting that he has spent
more than two decades of his life studying the poet's life and
work.

Celan's parents were
German-speaking Jews who lived in Czernowitz, a city in the eastern
part of the Austrian Empire. Celan was born there after the Great
War, when the city came under Romanian control. But he grew up amid
the songs, folktales and classics of German culture. He lost both
his parents during World War II -- they were picked up during an
overnight raid -- and never saw them again.

Celan eventually settled in
Paris, where he lived the rest of his life. But he wrote poetry in
German, which, of course, was the language of the Nazis.

"He
decided it was the only language he could tell the truth in,"
Felstiner said. "And he purged the German language through
poetry."

Former U.S. Poet Laureate
Robert Hass once devoted two syndicated columns to one of Celan's
most famous poems, "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue"), calling it "one of
the most indelible poems of the 20th century."

Elie
Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, called Celan among
"the greatest and most moving Jewish poets of our turbulent
time."

Felstiner first wrote a
literary biography of Celan -- Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor,
Jew -- published in 1995. The Selected Poems and Prose of
Paul Celan, translated by Felstiner, was published in
2000.

The
literary biography met with critical and popular acclaim. "People
needed Paul Celan. They needed to hear that voice," Felstiner
said.

Celan's poetry tends to be
vivid and dark; his life was striated by bouts of depression, and
he eventually committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine.
But Felstiner's translations keep us afloat on the dark, lyrical
and turbulent waters of the poet's verse and prose:

"Black milk of daybreak we
drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink . . . "